The Dublin Review (Volume 134) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904. Excerpt: ... Problems and Persons. By W1lfr1d Ward. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 8vo, pp. liw-377. 1903. IT is the disadvantage of a quarterly that it is precluded from giving to a work like that of Mr. Wilfrid Ward a notice as full and as prompt as its merits would deserve. As the present volume contains essays which, in one form or another, have already been given to the public, it will suffice for our purpose to record our sincere appreciation of its general contents. The essays are mainly biographical, and readers who are familiar with the ability and charm of the author in his lives of Cardinal Wiseman and of Dr. W. G. Ward, will have learned from such works of classic excellence to expect from his pen all that is most successful and most skilful in the domain of literary portraiture. Nor will they be disappointed, and the chapters of the present volume which deal with " persons " will serve but to enhance the high reputation which the author has earned as a past-master in the art of biography. The presentment of these living pictures in a manner at once so delightful and instructive will indeed seem to many to mark the field of literature in which Mr. Ward is most at home, and in which he is found at his best, and to define the ground upon which he treads with the security of achieved success. It is no disparagement to the essays which deal with " Problems " to say that their treatment lacks something of the sureness and precision of touch which makes itself felt in the personal sketches; for the problems are naturally of a kind which are bound up with the deeper and obscurer laws which lie at the root of things, and often hark back to the great dogmatic truths, of which the old scholastics so truly said that " Omnia exeunt in rnysteriunt." We do not mean to ...